Thursday, 31 May 2007

Dreaming, shuffling memories to new combinations

"Under construction"

It was 04:45 a.m. The vivid dream woke me up, puzzled as I was trying to distinguish between dream and reality. I felt I had to note it down, while it was remembered, still fresh in my memory. Before it is forgotten. However, it would not be significant as dreaming is just the shuffle of the things; events that happened, thoughts that crossed your mind, the day before. But wait, is there something worthwhile here. A new combination. Dreaming is shuffle, shuffle to new combinations, new combinations represent new thoughts, new thoughts a prerequisite of creative processes, dreaming connected to creative, creative to dreaming, dreaming the foremost example of imagination.

Apart from that, the mental note I so fervently wanted to write down, it was about a note posted in the Internet, that included within it, a reference to itself. A reference to itself? Self-referential? Was it in the Internet or was it in your own brain? Would it make any difference? Does that point to a similarity between the two structures? Of organisation? Self-similarity? That even though not everything has been elucidated for either of the structures, we should be free to assume that any model that applies for either of them, it would apply to the other one too. Any elements that become explicit for one, would expect to hold true for the other, too.

The odd thought that surfaced in that peculiar dream was triggered by my occasional browsing of program fault reports to Microsoft, among the tedium of information about the processes on, when the fault occurred, there are memory dumps of what was happening while you were online. Among them were personal messages from people that manage these memory dumps, in a form that resembled greetings to each other and these messages are carried while you browse the internet, completely unaware of their existence, the noise that represent the froth of the World Wide Web virtual digital environment. A TCP or UDP packet roaming the virtual vacuum, entering an IP address leaving their signature, sometimes harmful if it is a virus, wandering aimlessly directionless, a virtual message-in-a-bottle in the digital ocean. What if that virtual message-in-a-bottle had shape, determined by code in the same manner as a widget, and could sent information in an associated e-mail address that once it has been detected and clicked it would send that information to its e-mail address, a record of its whereabouts. At the same time the reference to itself would create information that will change the message-in-the-bottle in ways that reflect the information acquired by its encounters in the World Wide Web. To what effect? Who knows? The whole process might be in want, of identifying itself by goals and purpose, however its more important aspect is that it contains a chaotic seed (the self-referential and what will emerge, it can not be known. It would suffice to simply state that it will produce emergence. An emerging state. Its self-referential nature implied by the feedback loop, more vividly remembered. So somehow the statement contained a reference to itself, and that reference was fed back, and producing another statement, with new elements added on, and still containing the reference to itself too.And the process continued till, may be not 'till' but simply stating: producing emergence.